A new artificial intelligence model named Koa was introduced by Salesforce at its Dreamforce tech conference, marking a significant step in the company’s AI strategy. Koa is Salesforce’s first reasoning model, built upon Nvidia’s open-weight Nemotron model. Together, Salesforce and Nvidia fine-tuned Koa to perform tasks specific to sales, marketing, and customer support. This model is designed to handle practical, everyday business tasks rather than tackling abstract or complex problems. Koa represents a shift in how enterprises approach AI, offering an alternative to the closed, proprietary models developed by leading AI labs. Typically, companies using these models must upload data, code, and prompts directly into the AI system, often at high cost. In contrast, Koa is an open-weight model, meaning it’s not restricted by proprietary walls. It avoids using actual customer data, reducing the risk of data leaks, and it uses fewer computational tokens—making it more cost-effective. It also automatically routes through Salesforce’s AI gateway, ensuring compliance with the customer’s data policies and security standards. Koa will be integrated into Salesforce’s Agentforce platform, where businesses build AI agents to perform routine tasks like responding to customer inquiries or scheduling appointments. According to Jayesh Govindarajan, Salesforce’s Executive Vice President of AI, the company previously relied on external AI models for complex reasoning tasks. "Until now, we've relied on frontier model providers for reasoning," he said. With Koa, Salesforce is now capable of handling those tasks internally, without depending on external models like Claude or ChatGPT. To train Koa, Salesforce and Nvidia used synthetic data rather than real customer data. This data simulated real-world scenarios, including interactions with frustrated customers and sales professionals working to close deals. The approach ensures that Koa can perform well on practical tasks without compromising customer privacy. According to Kari Ann Briski, Nvidia’s Vice President of Generative AI Software for Enterprise, Koa’s design also makes it more efficient in terms of token usage, which helps reduce AI costs. Despite the introduction of Koa, Salesforce continues to partner with other AI providers. Recently, the company announced a collaboration with Anthropic called ClaudeForce, which allows businesses to use the Claude AI model while keeping their data secure within Salesforce’s infrastructure. This shows that while Koa is a key addition to Salesforce’s AI toolkit, the company still values its existing partnerships in the AI space.